Erwin Drechsler's restaurant to close July 1

Longtime Chicago chef Erwin Drechsler announced in an e-mail to customers that his eponymous Lakeview restaurant would be closing July 1 after 18 years.

Drechsler's culinary influence around town have rippled long and wide. His acclaimed restaurants in the 1980’s — including Metropolis Cafe and Metropolis 1800 — were a training ground for future James Beard Award-winning chefs like Paul Kahan and Mindy Segal.

Drechsler's cooking was influenced by the likes of Alice Waters, but to a greater extent, Jeremiah Tower and Wolfgang Puck, chefs who ushered in California cuisine. Twenty-five years ago, it was considered a novelty to find housemade pastas with rock shrimp and preserved lemons on a menu, but Drechsler was somewhat of a local pioneer in the modern American bistro movement. He would open erwin in 1994 (lower case intentional), a restaurant that became a supporter of local farmers. He was a proponent of using native Midwestern ingredients — you’d always find a Great Lakes fish on the menu, and his Michigan cherry pie drew a devout following. His burger was also regarded as among the finest renditions in the city.

"Erwin was the first guy who took me to a farmer’s market and taught me the ins and outs of seasonality," said Paul Kahan, who spent seven years cooking at three of Drechsler's restaurants. "Metropolis Cafe was a great lab for trial and error. We learned every possible cooking technique from roasting to sauteeing to poaching, and we learned it the old fashioned way, tasting everything. From Erwin I also learned a lot about being a good person and leader ... being a solutions guy and not a problem guy."

Said Mindy Segal of HotChocolate: "Erwin was one of the best chefs I ever worked for. He helped me shape my career. I love and support him in his future endeavors."

Reservations are being taken now until dinner service Sunday on July 1.

***UPDATE***

We spoke with Drechsler about his decision to close the restaurant.

"It was a pretty agonizing decision over the last year," he said by phone. "We’ve been doing this a long time. We started in 1983 with Metropolis Café and then on Clybourn with Metropolis 1800 and then in 1993 we opened Erwin. So it’s been about 30 years in the restaurant business."

But it wasn’t just weariness or a down economy that influenced the decision. Last year when their eldest son Isaac was diagnosed with lymphoma, Drechsler said that he and his wife Cathy began to reassess their priorities.

"He’s fine now, but the whole experience of the chemotherapy and radiation and not knowing what to expect really caused us to do a 180 on what’s important in our lives right now," he said. "We've always been very career driven but that stopped us in our tracks and turned us upside down. We thought it was time to re-prioritize our goals and values."

The restaurateur says that he and Cathy are considering different opportunities and things "that we can be part of and be successful … basically we want to make this year a year of change."

Does this mean he’s leaving the food business? Not quite yet. "I’ve become interested in developing a high quality fast food Italian concept," he revealed. "Something that is not really happening in Chicago… It involves flatbreads that are cooked to order and converted into sandwiches. And you could do them like pizza and you could do prosciutto, arugula and fontina or roasted vegetables.”

So does he see himself following the footsteps of other full service Chicago restaurateurs who have left that world for something simpler? "Absolutely," he said. "Not that it would necessarily be simpler because I haven’t done it yet. But it’s definitely something more focused on fewer details. Something where I might be able to wrap it up and go home by 6 p.m."

Drechsler says he has no specific time frame or location for such a project, just lots of ideas and networking for now. He said he’s heard from many long time customers who are disappointed about the closing. "We are just so grateful for the opportunity to have developed these wonderful relationships with people." he says. "But I just tell them 'happy trails until we meet again' because we will meet again at some point. I just don’t where and when."